Review of Donnie Darko

Introduction

Depressed teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) starts seeing a giant bunny rabbit foretelling the end of the world during his nightly sleepwalks, an event which coincides with the seemingly inexplicable arrival of a jet engine where his bedroom used to be. Whilst the authorities struggle for an explanation to this baffling happening, Donnie interprets this as an eerie annoucement of ‘Frank’s prophecies. As a result, Donnie resolves to unravel the connections between his mysterious visions and the perplexing series of events that have taken place in his suburban community since the night of the accident. What follows is a bemusing mystery of sorts, organized around the routine construction of a young man’s search for himself. Writer/Director Richard Kelly’s debut feature posits itself as a mix of psychological drama, social satire, comic-book homage, science-fiction and metaphysical speculation. In other words, it’s the ideal popcorn movie for people who think they’re really clever.

Video

Cinematographer Steven Poster does wonders with the small budget, creating a nuanced palette of hyper-real blues and greys. It is served well in a good, if hardly dazzling anamorphic transfer.

Audio

A choice of 5.1 and stereo. Kelly litters the sound design with some inventive touches, adding to the hallucinogenic palette of the film and an inventive use of unexpected ‘80s treats on the soundtrack is a welcome addition. Good use of surrounds.

Features

Building on from the unexpectedly excellent Region 1 release, Metrodome have shoe-horned in a couple more novelties: a brief featurette about a graffiti convention, showcasing the artists’ work that was inspired by the film, scored to Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ cover of Tears for Fears ‘Mad World’ (which also appears memorably in the film.) Also new is a brief selection of rather incomprehensible outtakes; a comprehensive but rather sketchy assortment of interviews and a more readable ‘Philosphy of Time Travel’ for the seriously curious. Amongst the oddities are a collection of complete ‘Cunning Visions’ promos which are amusing, faintly disturbing but rather repetitive; a website and artwork gallery and some trailers and TV spots that display a suitable befuddlement about how to market the film.

Two commentaries vary in quality, from the involving: with Kelly and Gyllenhaal; to the jaw-droppingly sycophantic: Kelly and the rest of his relentlessly brown-nosing cast. Whilst Gyllenhaal and Kelly are modest, witty and informative, Kelly is rather listless and incoherent when swamped by the unblemished praise of the likes of Drew Barrymore, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne and Katharine Ross. Better are the deleted scenes which, whilst sadly still in their rough-cut form, help the initially baffled among us to untangle some of the loose plot details (whilst still maintain some dignity that we managed it ourselves), deliberately left ambiguous by director Kelly. The result is some of the most enlightening deleted footage yet seen on DVD and a very worthy conclusion to a package that should stand as an example to other low-budget films.

Conclusion

Much has been made of this film’s originality, a claim that has a great deal to do with the film’s lack of obvious generic location and the current fixation on enigmatic narrative constructions. However, a lot of the freshness evaporates when the film’s mystery is revealed as a mere veil. There’s no real perplexing enigma at the heart of ‘Donnie Darko’, just a rather trite comment about self-sacrifice that cheapens the complexity previously alluded to in the work. The result is a film that is quite a lot of work (or very little, depending on your constitution for willfully obscure mind-benders like this) for not much pay-off. Many of the intriguing sub-plots: child exploitation, self-help gurus, moral hypocrisy and familial dynamics hang around as inefficacious as the ‘80s pop-cultural references that litter the screenplay. Kelly claims to have offered an open-ended text for the ambiguous interpretations of the audience, however, this only holds water in ignorance of the director’s intended purpose with this film (which is both unambiguous and repeatedly stated) and no-one could claim ignorance of this after even a cursory glance at the disc.

So if there’s a flakiness to the overall conception of ‘Donnie Darko’, there’s also a great deal to like about it: a flawless series of performances, a seductive and evocative visual style, a compellingly convoluted series of interrelated themes and subplots. What surprises most of all perhaps is the warmth and humanity apparent in the venture: this is no cynical, academic dissection, but an emotive, sympathetic and appealing work. This, I suspect, has a lot to do with its new-found allure with audiences, attracted as much by its conventional deployment of a sympathetic lead with a coming-of-age crisis as its supposed genre-busting conceits.

Director Richard Kelly has been frequently compared with David Lynch, and whilst this seems a rather dubious association given the absence of any previous work on Kelley’s side, and Lynch’s massive diversity on the other; similarities can be seen in ‘Donnie Darko’s labyrinthine plot with its elusive throughline and Lynch’s jumbled Mobius-strips like ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Lost Highway’. Whilst much of the appeal of these Lynch films is narcissistic (a self-aggrandized one-up-man-ship is granted to those who boastfully ‘solve’ the puzzle) it would be a pity for Kelly’s debut to follow the same fate. For this is a moving, muddled, fascinating, inquisitive and ultimately deeply felt fantasy of neurotic adolescence. Indeed, the fact that it never fully comes together may only make the viewer warm more to this exploration of teenage angst and yearning. An encouraging debut.